What Los Angeles means to me

"Obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.”

Los Angeles is about overcast mornings giving way to overpriced afternoon patios and overly manicured sunscaped rooftops. 

It’s about palm trees standing in for skyscrapers, dotting the city’s avenues that lead to evidence of both decadence and decline. And eventually, sand and salt water. 

It’s about tolerating crawling at 10 miles an hour for 6 and a quarter miles on a 5-lane highway for 75 minutes in a leased Lamborghini. 

Los Angeles is about what you’re wearing, not what you’re reading. It’s about advertising yourself as pescatarian at a vegan coffee shop — not playing parliamentarian inside a Twitter Spaces. 

Which means it goes without saying that it’s about *not* knowing the news of the Senate Republican leadership transition-in-the-making — and being pretty enough not to have to. 

I’ve long romanticized Los Angeles because it’s the exotic antithesis to Washington. Its sheer distance provides escapist allure. Matching its weather, the people and the pace are decidedly milder, if not always in manner, in mindset. 

It’s a nice place to die slowly, as the wall art in Venice declares.

So of course, it was while I was mid-flight enroute to the City of Angels for four nights when news came raining down on my visit to a megalopolis that couldn’t care less.